The crowds on the street seemed to sway to and fro in contending waves, and the cries, curses, and screams came up in a savage chorus.
The heat was already almost blistering to the skin, though they carefully avoided the direct rays, and instruments of glass in the laboratory cracked loudly one by one.
A vast cloud of dark smoke began to rise from the harbor, where the shipping must have caught fire, and something exploded with a terrific report. A few minutes later half a dozen fires broke out in the lower part of the city, rolling up volumes of smoke that faded to a thin mist in the dazzling light.
The great new sun was now fully above the horizon, and the whole east seemed ablaze. The stampede in the streets had quieted all at once, for the survivors had taken refuge in the nearest houses, and the pavements were black with motionless forms of men and women.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” said Alice, who was deadly pale, but remarkably collected. Even at that moment Eastwood was struck by the splendor of her ethereally brilliant hair that burned like pale flame above her pallid face. “But we can’t stay here, can we?”
“No,” replied Eastwood, trying to collect his faculties in the face of this catastrophe revolution of nature. “We’d better go to the basement, I think.”
In the basement were deep vaults used for the storage of delicate instruments, and these would afford shelter for a time at least. It occurred to him as he spoke that perhaps temporary safety was the best that any living thing on Earth could hope for.
But he led the way down the well staircase. They had gone down six or seven flights when a gloom seemed to grow upon the air, with a welcome relief.
It seemed almost cool, and the sky had clouded heavily, with the appearance of polished and heated silver.
A deep but distant roaring arose and grew from the southeast, and they stopped on the second landing to look from the window.
A vast black mass seemed to fill the space between sea and sky, and it was sweeping toward the city, probably from the harbor, Eastwood thought, at a speed that made it visibly grow as they watched it.
“A cyclone – and a water-spout!” muttered Eastwood, appalled.
He might have foreseen it from the sudden, excessive evaporation and the heating of the air. The gigantic black pillar drove toward them swaying and reeling, and a gale came with it, and a wall of impenetrable mist behind.
As Eastwood watched its progress he saw its cloudy bulk illumined momentarily by a dozen lightning-like flashes, and a moment later, above its roar, came the tremendous detonations of heavy cannon.
The forts and the warships were firing shells to break the waterspout, but the shots seemed to produce no effect. It was the city’s last and useless attempt at resistance. A moment later forts and ships alike must have been engulfed.
“Hurry! This building will collapse!” Eastwood shouted.
They rushed down another flight, and heard the crash with which the monster broke over the city. A deluge of water, like the emptying of a reservoir, thundered upon the street, and the water was steaming hot as it fell.
There was a rending crash of falling walls, and in another instant the Physics Building seemed to be twisted around by a powerful hand. The walls blew out, and the whole structure sank in a chaotic mass.
But the tough steel frame was practically unwreekable, and, in fact, the upper portion was simply bent down upon the lower stories peeling off most of the shell of masonry and stucco.
Eastwood was stunned as he was hurled to the floor, but when he came to himself he was still upon the landing, which was tilted at an alarming angle. A tangled mass of steel rods and beams hung a yard over his head, and a huge steel girder had plunged down perpendicularly from above, smashing everything in its way.
Wreckage choked the well of the staircase, a mass of plaster, bricks, and shattered furniture surrounded him, and he could look out in almost every direction through the rent iron skeleton.
A yard away Alice was sitting up, mechanically wiping the mud and water from her face, and apparently uninjured. Tepid water was pouring through the interstices of the wreck in torrents, though it did not appear to be raining.
A steady, powerful gale had followed the whirlwind, and it brought a little coolness with it. Eastwood inquired perfunctorily of Alice if she were hurt, without being able to feel any degree of interest in the matter. His faculty of sympathy seemed paralyzed.
“I don’t know. I thought – I thought that we were all dead!” the girl murmured in a sort of daze. “What was it? Is it all over?”
“I think it’s only beginning,” Eastwood answered dully.
The gale had brought up more cloud, and the skies were thickly overcast, but shining white-hot. Presently the rain came down in almost scalding floods, and as it fell upon the hissing streets it steamed again into the air.
In three minutes all the world was choked with hot vapor, and from the roar and splash the streets seemed to be running rivers.
The downpour seemed too violent to endure, and after an hour it did cease, while the city reeked with mist. Through the whirling fog Eastwood caught glimpses of ruined buildings, vast heaps of debris, all the wreckage of the greatest city of the twentieth century.
Then the torrents fell again like a cataract, as if the waters of the Earth were shuttlecocking between sea and heaven. With a jarring tremor of the ground a landslide went down into the Hudson.
The atmosphere was like a vapor bath, choking and sickening. The physical agony of respiration aroused Alice from a sort of stupor, and she cried out pitifully that she would die.
The strong wind drove the hot spray and steam through the shattered building till it seemed impossible that human lungs could extract life from the semi-liquid that had replaced the air, but the two lived.
After hours of this parboiling, the rain slackened, and, as the clouds parted, Eastwood caught a glimpse of a familiar form half way up the heavens. It was the sun, the old sun, looking, small and watery.
But the intense heat and brightness told that the enormous body still blazed behind the clouds. The rain seemed to have ceased definitely, and the hard, shining whiteness of the sky grew rapidly hotter.
The heat of the air increased to an oven-like degree; the mists were dissipated, the clouds licked up, and the earth seemed to dry itself almost immediately. The heat from the two suns beat down simultaneously till it became a monstrous terror, unendurable.
An odor of smoke began to permeate the air; there was a dazzling shimmer, over the streets, and great clouds of mist arose from the bay, but these appeared to evaporate before they could darken the sky.
The piled wreck of the building sheltered the two refugees from the direct rays of the new sun, now almost overhead, but not from the penetrating heat of the air. But the body will endure almost anything, short of tearing asunder, for a time at least; it is the finer mechanism of the nerves that suffers most.
Alice lay face down among the bricks, gasping and moaning. The blood hammered in Eastwood’s brain, and the strangest mirages flickered before his eyes.
Alternately he lapsed into heavy stupors, and awoke to the agony of the day. In his lucid moments he reflected that this could not last long, and tried to remember what degree of heat would cause death.
Within an hour after the drenching rains he was feverishly thirsty, and the skin felt as if peeling from his whole body.
This fever and horror lasted until he forgot that he had ever known another state; but at last the west reddened, and the flaming sun went down. It left the familiar planet high in the heavens, and there was no darkness until the usual hour, though there was a slight lowering of the temperature.
But when night did come it brought life-giving coolness, and though the heat was still intense it seemed temperate by comparison. More than all, the kindly darkness seemed to set a limit to the cataclysmic disorders of the day.
“Ouf! This is heavenly!” said Eastwood, drawing long breaths and feeling mind and
body revived in the gloom.
“It won’t last long,” replied Alice, and her voice sounded extraordinarily calm through the darkness. “The heat will come again when the new sun rises in a few hours.”
“We might find some better place in the meanwhile – a deep cellar – or we might get into the Subway,” Eastwood suggested.
“It would be no use. Don’t you understand? I have been thinking it all out. After this, the new sun will always shine, and we could not endure it even another day. The wave of heat is passing round the world as it revolves, and in a few hours the whole Earth will be a burnt-up ball. Very likely we are the only people left alive in New York, or perhaps America.”
She seemed to have taken the intellectual initiative, and spoke with an assumption of authority that amazed him.
“But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”
“They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.
“Think of it,” she went on dreamily. “For a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious, that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”
“I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive – some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.
“But I can’t realize it at all – this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause. “Is it real? Or have we gone mad? It seems too much like a bad dream.”
The rain crashed down again as he spoke, and the earth steamed, though not with the dense reek of the day. For hours the waters roared and splashed against the Earth in hot billows till the streets were foaming yellow rivers, dammed by the wreck of fallen buildings.
There was a continual rumble as earth and rock slid into the East River, and at last the Brooklyn Bridge collapsed with a thunderous crash and splash that made all Manhattan vibrate. A gigantic billow like a tidal wave swept up the river from its fall.
The downpour slackened and ceased soon after the moon began to shed an obscured but brilliant light through the clouds.
Presently the east commenced to grow luminous, and this time there could be no doubt as to what was coming.
Alice crept closer to the man as the gray light rose upon the watery air.
“Kiss me!” she whispered suddenly, throwing her arms around his neck. He could feel her trembling. “Say you love me. Hold me in your arms. I want you to love me – now – now. There is only an hour.”
“Don’t be afraid. Try to face it bravely,” stammered Eastwood.
“I don’t fear it – not death. But I have never lived. I have never had love. I have never felt or known anything. I have always been timid and wretched and afraid – afraid to speak – and I’ve almost wished for suffering and misery or anything rather than to be stupid and dumb and dead, as I’ve always been.
“I’ve never dared to tell anyone what I was, what I wanted. I’ve been afraid all my life, but I’m not afraid now. I have never lived. I have never been happy, and now we must die together!”
It seemed to Eastwood the cry of the perishing world. He held her in his arms and kissed her wet, tremulous face that was strained to his.
In that terrible desolation his heart turned toward her, and a strange passion intoxicated him as his lips met hers, an intoxication and passion more poignant for the certainty of coming death.
“You must love me – you must!” whispered Alice. “Let us live, a little, at the very last!”
The twilight was gone before he knew it. The sky was blue already, with crimson flakes mounting to the zenith, and the heat was growing once more intense.
“This is the end, Alice,” said Eastwood, and his voice trembled.
She looked at him, her eyes shining with an unearthly softness and brilliancy, and turned her face to the east.
There, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.
The Last Days of Earth
George C. Wallis
George C. Wallis (1871–1956) wrote extensively for the British magazines and the boys’ story papers at the start of the last century. He became a cinema manager in Sheffield but continued to write into the 1940s. The following story, which takes the complete opposite premise to the previous one, is rather more dated, though it is a wonderful example of Victorian values and attitude. It comes from The Harmsworth Magazine for July 1901. I wanted to reprint it not only for its fascinating imagery but also for its climax, which is very unusual for its day.
A man and a woman sat facing each other across a table in a large room. They were talking slowly, and eating – eating their last meal on earth. The end was near; the sun had ceased to warm, was but a red-hot cinder outwardly; and these two, to the best of their belief, were the last people left alive in a world-wilderness of ice and snow and unbearable cold.
The woman was beautiful – very fair and slight, but with the tinge of health upon her delicate skin and the fire of intellect in her eyes. The man was of medium height, broad-shouldered, with wide, bald head and resolute mien – a man of courage, dauntless purpose, strenuous life. Both were dressed in long robes of a thick, black material, held in at the waist by a girdle.
As they talked, their fingers were busy with a row of small white knobs let into the surface of the table, and marked with various signs. At the pressure of each knob a flap in the middle of the table opened, and a small glass vessel, with a dark, semi-liquid compound steaming in it, was pushed up. As these came, in obedience to the tapping of their fingers, the two ate their contents with the aid of tiny spoons. There was no other dining apparatus or dinner furniture upon the table, which stood upon a single but massive pedestal of grey metal.
The meal over, the glasses and spoons replaced, the table surface clean and clear, a silence fell between them. The man rested his elbows upon his knees and his chin upon his upturned palms. He did not look at his fair companion, but beyond her, at a complicated structure projecting from the wall. This was the Time Indicator, and gave, on its various discs, the year, the month, the day, the hour and the instant, all corrected to mean astronomical time and to the exact latitude and longitude of the place. He read the well-known symbols with defiant eyes. He saw that it was just a quarter to thirteen in the afternoon of Thursday, July 18th, 13,000,085 A.D. He reflected that the long association of the place with time-recording had been labour spent in vain. The room was in a great building on the site of ancient Greenwich. In fact, the last name given to the locality by its now dead and cold inhabitants had been Grenijia.
From the time machine, the man’s gaze went round the room. He noted, with apparently keen interest, all the things that were so familiar to him – the severely plain walls, transparent on one side, but without window-frame or visible door in their continuity; the chilling prospect of a faintly-lit expanse of snow outside; the big telescope that moved in an airtight slide across the ceiling, and the little motor that controlled its motions; the electric radiators that heated the place, forming an almost unbroken dado round the walls; the globe of pale brilliance that hung in the middle of the room and assisted the twilight glimmer of the day; the neat library of books and photo-phono cylinders, and the tier of speaking machines beneath it; the bed in the further corner, surrounded by yet more radiators; the two ventilating valves; the great dull disc of the Pictorial Telegraph; and the thermometer let into a vacant space of floor. On this last his glance rested for some time, and the woman’s also. It registered the degrees from absolute zero, and stood at a figure equivalent to 42° Fahrenheit.
From this tell-tale instrument the eyes of the two turned to each other, a common knowledge shining in each face. The man was the first to speak again.
“A whole degree, Celia, since yesterday. And the dynamos are giving out a current at a pressure of 6,000 volts. I can’t run them at any higher efficiency. That means that any further fall of temperature will close the drama of this planet. Shall we go tonight?”
There was no quiver of fear nor hint of resentment in his voice, nor in the voice that answered him. Long ages of mental evolution had weeded all the petty vices and unreasoning passions out of the mind of man.
“I am ready any time, Alwyn. I do not like to go; I do not like the risk of going: but it is our last duty to the humanity behind us – and I must be with you to the end.”
There was another silence between them: a silence in which the humming of the dynamos in the room below seemed to pervade the whole place, thrilling through everything with annoying audibility. Suddenly the man leaned forward, regarding his companion with a puzzled expression.
“Your eyelashes are damp, Celia. You are not crying? That is too archaic.”
“I must plead guilty,” she said, banishing the sad look with an effort. “We are not yet so thoroughly adjusted to our surroundings as to be able to crush down every weak impulse. Wasn’t it the day before yesterday that you said the sun had begun to cool about five million years too soon for man? But I will not give way again. Shall we start at once?”
“That is better; that sounds like Celia. Yes, if you wish, at once; but I had thought of taking a last look round the world – at least, as far as the telegraph system is in order. We have three hours’ daylight yet.”
For answer, Celia came and sat beside him on the couch facing the disc of the Pictorial Telegraph. His left hand clasped her right; both were cold. With his right hand he pulled over and held down a small lever under the disc – one of many, each bearing a distinctive name and numeral.
The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 28